Monday, 3 November 2014

The reality of the conditions for farmworkers in South Africa

It seems that no music
video in the history of South African music, has attracted as much controversy
as the Cape Town hip hop collective Dookoom’s “Larney Jou Poes,” which loosely
translates into English as “Boss, you’re a cunt”. In the two weeks since its
release, it has attracted over 50,000 views and inspired innumerable op-eds,
mainly in response to the accusation made by the opportunistic far right-wing
Afrikaner lobby group Afriforum, that the video was racist hate speech. The
video shows Dookom frontman and OG Cape Flats rapper Isaac Mutant leading a
group of angry farmworkers on a tractor, and culminates in the word “Dookoom”
being burnt into the hill of a farm.

A video showing
farmworkers clutching guns, farming implements and the burning of the band’s
name into a hill seems rather tame in the world of hip hop. NWA made Fuck thePolice in 1988, and the ante has only been upped since then in terms of
violence, graphic sex and drugs.

There are innumerable hip
hop tracks that contain threats of violence, boasts about cocaine sales and
references to real world violence, all of which are free to see in South
Africa, and that Afriforum, who most likely didn’t know what hip hop was until
they saw the video, didn’t call to ban. Why, then, is there such an
overreaction to Dookoom’s video?

The answer of course
originates, like so many other things, in South Africa’s history of race
relations. Despite the long history of the white minority screwing over blacks
in South Africa since 1652, as Isaac Mutant points out in the song, there has
been a carefully planned effort to re-brand us whites as the true victims of
South Africa’s history – particularly Afrikaans farmers. By drawing on the
imagery apocalyptic fantasies of natives rising up against the colonizer in a
frenzy of bloodlust that pervades the colonial imagination, right-wing lobby
groups have been able to spread a myth of an ongoing campaign of violence and
genocide directed by blacks with the covert support of the ruling African
National Congress against white farmers in the international media.

This campaign has seen
groups, who essentially have separatist and borderline fascist politics that
call for an Afrikaner homeland as a form of returning to the good old days of
apartheid, go through a process of re-branding in which they disguise their
racist politics in the discourse of human rights.

At one level, they have
quite successfully adopted the language of “minority rights” from the domain of
United States politics. This language can be quite easily used to shift the
focus from the legacy of slavery, colonialism and white supremacy to giving
“minorities” a seat at the table. At the next level, these groups claim that
attacks on Afrikaans farmers are at a genocidal level and form part of a grand
plot. In this they have adopted the genocide discourse, which has becoming
increasingly popularised in international politics following the Rwandan
genocide. White genocide in South Africa is mythical; the evidence suggests
that the murder rate among South African whites is comparable to that found in
Europe or the United States, while the country’s murder rate as a whole,
despite have significantly decreased since the late 90s, is far higher than the
world average stand at 32.2 per 100 000. Most murder victims are black males.

This myth is used to
portray black anger, particularly directed towards the question of land reform,
as essentially criminal in nature and beyond the pale in a democratic South
Africa. Lobby groups such as Afriforum style themselves as a human rights group,
when they simply are another obstacle to economic transformation in South
Africa.

But back to Dookoom, on
the 4th of November 2012 in De Doorns, a town on the outskirts of the Great
Karoo desert, just off the N1 (the national highway that connects the cities of
Johannesburg and Cape Town), a number of grape pickers refused to work. This
set off a wave that quickly spread beyond the confines of the town across the
Boland (the fruit- and wine-growing area of the Western Cape,) in which
thousands of workers joined a wildcat strike demanding a new minimum wage of
R150 a day. I was covering the strike as a journalist at the time.

The strike did not
originate, contrary to the paranoid insinuations of the Democratic Alliance,
the centre-right party that governs the Western Cape, in the machinations of an
ANC determined to win back the one province not under its control. It began
with a group of workers at a single farm in De Doorns, mostly women, sick of a
system that is best described as an updated version of feudalism persistent in
the farmlands and the “hunger loan” of R69 ($5), as workers described it to me.
Workers sick of the racist paternalism of white commercial farmers, workers
sick of not having money to feed their kids or send them to school, and the entire
legacy of the 1913 land act – the culmination of a historical process of the
dispossession of black South Africans of their land.

In a sadistic,
co-ordinated response to the striking farmers – particularly in Robertson –
farm owners are ensuring that their colleagues will not hire so-called problem
workers who they have dismissed after the strike, saying the financial burden
of the new minimum wage is coercing them into restructuring. Many workers have
simply not received the new minimum wage at all as farmers desperately applied
to the department of labor for an exemption from paying the new wage, relying
on the lengthy nature of bureaucratic processes to buy them a window to
co-ordinate a response to the strike. Other permanent workers have been fired
only to be rehired as casual laborers, often through labor brokers, and farmers
have increased their efforts to scour remote places such as Upington in the
Northern Cape in an effort to secure cheaper and more placid workers.

The agricultural sector
is notorious for being of one the most difficult sectors for unions to organize
due to the seasonal nature of employment for many workers, the sheer distance
between workers on different farms, and the very nature of the relations
between farmers and permanent workers. Most permanent workers live on farms and
many are from families who have lived there for generations. Farmers often
refer to these workers as being part of what they call an extended family,
despite the starvation wages that are the norm in the sector.

Farmworkers are locked
into a relationship in which they are dependent on farmers not only for their
accommodation, but for the necessities of life – from children’s school
clothing to fuel for keeping their homes warm during the winter. While farmers
often consider their support for these necessities indicative of their
longstanding charity and generosity, they ignore the fact that workers are
dependent on their goodwill in order to survive because wages are far below the
cost of reproduction.

Workers’ dependence on
farmers for accommodation and what farmers call charity is now being used as a
weapon of retribution in the aftermath of the wage increases, just as it was
used coercively to discourage workers from taking action before the uprising.
The insidious character of the relations between farmers and workers is further
underscored by the perpetuation of such abominable practices as the infamous
dop system – paying workers with cheap alcohol instead of money.

Another coercive practice
occurs in the form of micro-credit made available to workers through farmers,
either through shops run by farmers on their properties or through small loans
given to workers to help them make ends meet. These loans lock workers into a
perpetual cycle of debt as they are forced to spend a significant percentage of
their monthly earnings on repaying their employer. This is on top of the rent,
water, and electricity workers already pay to farmers.

After the uprising,
farmers retaliated against workers who participated in the strike and their
families by retrenching them, justifying this move by citing the financial
burden of the the new minimum wage and the workers’ participation in an ‘illegal’
or ‘unprotected’ strike. Of course, it would have been impossible for them to
have participated in a protected strike, because less than 10% of workers in
the sector are unionized.

Farmers then raised the
rents of workers’ accommodation, often by over a 100%, and threatened to evict
those who couldn’t pay. Some began to force family members who didn’t work on
the farm to pay rent for the first time. Others threatened to evict dismissed
workers, claiming they needed to make space for new employees. Many permanent
employees have been fired and rehired on a temporary basis, forming part of an
increasing casualization of the farm workforce. For example, over 60 CSAAWU
(Commercial Stevedores and Agricultural Workers Union) members, many of them
women and union leaders were dismissed in the aftermath of the strike.
Furthermore, most of the retrenched farmworkers have been blacklisted, meaning
that other farmers refuse to hire them.

The quality of the
farmworkers’ houses is often disguised by a fresh coat of paint or, in some of
the farms near Robertson, by solar panels. While these houses may appear
comfortable, spacious, and environmentally “correct” to a casual passer-by,
they in fact often house eight people in only two rooms and have no running
water. The solar panels, giving the illusion of the farmers’ commitment to
defence of the planet, are rarely connected, actually serving as window
dressing designed to impress rather than as a source of power. Many of these
houses are still covered by toxic asbestos roofs.

This paternalistic
mentality resurfaces again in the responses from organizations such as
Afriforum to the Dookoom video. They claim that because the video violates the
tone of civility required to engage in the process of land reform, it should be
removed from the public sphere. In other words, because the video presents
violence against property and has some nasty words in it, it’s a threat to
social cohesion, something needed for the process of land reform. In essence,
these groups are attempting to remove the anger at the core of the strike from
the discussion, and instead place it into the domain of racist hate speech.
Removed from the discussion, of course, are the horrific work conditions that
are predominant in the agricultural industry and the poverty wages that
continue to be paid.

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.